Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/113

 under all circumstances an absolutely deadly effect on the social instincts. Since in this struggle each one asserts himself so much the better the less he allows himself to be led by social considerations, the more exclusively he has his own interest in view. For men under a developed system of production of commodities it seems only too clear that egoism is the only natural impulse in man, and that the social impulses are only a refined egoism, or an invention of priests to get mastery over man, or to be regarded as a supernatural mystery. If in the society of to-day the social impulses have kept any strength, it is only due to the circumstance that general commodity production is quite a young phenomenon, hardly 100 years old, and that in the degree in which the primitive democratic communism disappears, and therewith war ceases to be a source of social impulses, a new source of the same breaks forth so much the stronger—the class war of the forward-struggling exploited classes of the people; a war not by paid soldiers, not by conscripts, but by volunteers—not for other people’s interests, but fought in the interests of their own class.

The sphere in which the social instincts develop changes at a far quicker rate than the degree of strength of these instincts themselves. The traditional Ethics looked on the moral law as the force which regulates the relations of man to man. Since this view sets out from the individual and not from society, it entirely overlooks the fact that the moral law does not regulate the intercourse of men with every other man, but simply with men of the same society. That it only holds good for these will be comprehensible when we recollect the origin of the social instincts. They are a means to increase the social cohesion, to add to the strength of society. The animal has social instincts only for the members of his own herd, the other herds are more or less indifferent to him. Among